


Off The Beaten Track

by alyyks



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: GFY, Gen, Not Canon Compliant - Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Mess, The Force Did It, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-29 23:35:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13937835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/pseuds/alyyks
Summary: From a prompt: Anon asked: "Are you sure this is the right direction?"Poe risked a glance over his shoulder when no answer came. He met Rey’s gaze. She just shrugged. He turned his attention back to navigating the…road, or path, or whatever vague descriptor one would use for the not-really-a-track they had been following until now. Night had come, not that there had been much light dirtside to begin with, what with the heavy rain falling relentlessly since they had landed.





	Off The Beaten Track

**Author's Note:**

> Previously on tumblr, now cleaned up, and betaed by Saphsaq. Title by Saphsaq (thank you so much!)
> 
> Ben (Obi-Wan Kenobi) is this Ben: http://alyyks.tumblr.com/post/134310307318, from a story I will write one day, I swear.

“Ben?” Poe repeated. “Are you sure this is the right direction?”

Poe risked a glance over his shoulder when no answer came. He met Rey’s gaze. She just shrugged. He turned his attention back to navigating the…road, or path, or whatever vague descriptor one would use for the not-really-a-track they had been following until now. Night had come, not that there had been much light dirtside to begin with, what with the heavy rain falling relentlessly since they had landed.

The aging speeder’s canopy leaked, even with the tape job Rey had done on arrival—and one of the leaks was right above the front passenger’s seat, where Finn sat and tried to coax his datapad into displaying their mission information brightly enough to be read. Poe saw Finn flinch, probably as one more drop of cold water fell down his neck, then turn his head to look in the backseat and their passenger, turn back. “He hasn’t said anything against it,” Finn said, and really that was the best answer one could get in their situation.

 _Situation_ really was the best way to put it. Poe, Finn and Rey were stuck there until things made some sort of sense with their fourth, mostly-unresponsive, team member, until something happened, roped into the weirdest mission any of them had been for the Resistance yet by the universal “you were there when things happened and heard too much.”

“There when things happened and heard too much” involved, apparently, the Force, not-quite time-travel, and a man who was a shadow of a Jedi Master of old.

Another glance to the back revealed that said shadow kept staring at nothing outside, his gold eyes a little too wide. Ben was all “a little too…”: his hair was a little too short, his armor set—a real mandalorian _beskar’gam_ the like Poe hadn’t ever seen in person—was a little too dinged, his entire being was a little too peculiar. Ben gave Poe the creeps, possibly half in reaction to the name that was once worn by another Force-user who still starred in Poe’s nightmares, at the same time that Poe wanted to wrap Ben in a blanket and feed him for a while, to keep him as safe as anyone could be in this galaxy in a half-broken Resistance speeder with a former Republic pilot, a former First Order stormtrooper, and a Force-user.

Ben apparently knew he had that effect on most people, the push and pull of not-quite-right and not-quite-there and must-protect: the guy had apologized for it to Poe in one of his more lucid moments, when the group had been briefed. Poe had noticed that those moments had been more frequent around the General. He suspected what he had heard older Alliance members call “weird Jedi shit” growing up, a grab bag of things even pilots couldn’t tag as instinct and gut feelings— and that even if, aside for the fact he had grown up with a Force tree in his backyard and stories of Luke Skywalker and that he worked with General Leia Organa, he did not know much about the Force and consequent weird Jedi shit. Rey knew even less for all she could use it, even with the crash course the General had given her during the evacuation of D’Qar. Finn mostly kept quiet on the subject, but he regarded Ben like he was unexploded ordnance.

Ben was a strange man, and explaining his presence as a shadow of a Jedi Master and that the Force had done it had explained exactly nothing.

General Leia Organa had deemed that explanation sufficient and had refused to answer more questions, at the briefing. Poe was afraid to even start thinking that she didn’t have the answer to those questions. 

Ben had quite literally dropped on them while they were sneaking through the jungles of Felucia and old Clone Wars battlegrounds after their transport had crashed, interrupting an argument about fighting or running. Poe didn’t blame Finn for wanting to run as far from the First Order as the galaxy could allow it. Half the nights Poe could sleep, he woke up from nightmares leaving him wanting to join Finn into running to the end of the known territories. And then there was Rey, determined Rey, who had cried for her family and cried for the child she had been and had decided to drag Luke Skywalker back to the General, and stay, and learn, their glue, their stubbornness. Poe, Finn, Rey: they were a team that should never have been one and functioned a little too well, crashes and arguments notwithstanding. 

Now, the headlights outlining arches of something that could have been stone, just more dark and indistinct shapes in the night, it was possible to start to see why the General had given them both this mission and Ben. They made a certain flavor of impossible happen. 

Poe twitched at the sudden cold drops leaking from the crack between door and canopy onto his arm.

“Ben?” Rey asked again. He usually responded to her better than to him or Finn.

Ben did not answer her. He kept looking at the rain outside with unfocused gold eyes.

“It’s okay, we’ll just keep going,” Poe said, missing neither Rey’s nor Finn’s glances at him. How hard could it be to find a lost Jedi Temple without the input of the only person who had ever been there before?


End file.
